Göbekli Tepe is a name that will be familiar to anyone
interested in the ancient mysteries subject.

Billed as the oldest stone temple in the
world, it is composed of a series of megalithic structures
containing rings of beautifully carved T-shaped pillars. It sits on
a mountain ridge at the western termination of the Ante-Taurus range
in southeast Anatolia (today part of the Republic of Turkey), just
eight miles (thirteen kilometers) from the ancient city of Urfa,
Abraham’s traditional birthplace.

Here its secrets have remained hidden
beneath an artificial, belly-shaped mound for the last ten thousand
years.

Agriculture and animal husbandry were barely known when Göbekli Tepe was built, and roaming the fertile landscape of
southwest Asia were, we are told, primitive hunter-gatherers, whose
sole existence revolved around survival on a day-to-day basis.

So what is Göbekli Tepe? Who created it,
and why?

More pressingly, why did its builders
bury their creation at the end of its useful life?

Schmidt’s
Discovery

Göbekli Tepe was discovered as recently as 1994 by German
archaeologist Klaus Schmidt.

He was aware that a preliminary survey
of Göbekli Tepe made in 1963 had concluded that the scattered
fragments of cut and dressed limestone and broken pieces of
sculpture found here were the product of a long forgotten Byzantine
cemetery.

Yet when Schmidt arrived and saw not
only the stone fragments, but also the thousands of stone tools
littering the occupational mound, he concluded differently.

The mound, which is around 300 meters
(330 yards) in length, 250 meters (275 yards) in breadth and 15
meters (50 feet) in height, belonged to an infinitely older age, one
that thrived at the end of the Paleolithic age some eleven and a
half thousand years ago.

He knew also that unless he walked away
now, then he would be at Göbekli Tepe for the rest of his life.
Thankfully Schmidt did decide to stay and excavate the site, for it
was later discovered that the mountain ridge on which Göbekli Tepe
sits was scheduled to become a quarry, its limestone rock to be used
as foundation ballast for the new Urfa to Mardin highway.

Since 1995 Schmidt and his international
team of specialists, working on behalf of the German Archaeological
Institute and the Museum of Sanlıurfa (Urfa’s official title), have
uncovered four extraordinary stone structures at Göbekli Tepe,
constructed ca. 9500-8500 BC, along with a dozen or so smaller, and
often much simpler, rooms dating to ca. 8500-8000 BC.

The Large
Enclosures

The largest enclosures, known as C and D (see Fig. 1), are by far
the most complex, which is strange as they are also the oldest
structures unearthed so far.

Elliptical in shape, and measuring
between 15 and 20 meters (50 and 65 feet) in size, they each have
rings of T-shaped standing stones - originally twelve in number -
set within oval shaped walls made of quarry stones held in place by
a thin layer of mortar (Enclosure C has an additional, and slightly
later, inner ring of stones, as well as an approach passage or
dromos entering from the south).

The pillars, which are all manufactured
from limestone quarried from the mountain ridge, are very often
adorned with carvings of strange creatures of the natural world,
executed either in bas-relief or 3D sculpture.

The stones are positioned like spokes of
a wheel facing two much larger T-shaped monoliths, standing
side-by-side at the centre of the enclosures, like twin portals to
another world. In Enclosure C only the stumps of the central
monoliths remain. Yet those in Enclosure D (see Fig. 2) are complete
and rise to a height of 5.5 meters (18.5 feet).

Further examples of these twin central
pillars are to be seen in Enclosure B, as well as in some of the
younger structures uncovered at the site.

Humanoid
Statues

All the T-shapes, as Schmidt likes to call the hammer-headed
pillars, are meant to represent human figures.

Bent arms are carved in relief on their
wider, side faces. These terminate in hands with long, spindly
fingers that curl around the pillar’s front narrow edge. Dropping
vertically between the T-shaped "head" and the hands are twin
vertical lines, indicating the hems of an open garment or stole of
some kind.

Some T-shapes have a carved symbol on
their "necks," above which is a V-shaped double line indicating that
they are to be seen as pendants strung on cords, perhaps indicating
devices of recognition, or emblems of office. They include bulls’
heads (bucrania), as well as H shapes, and also an eye cupped by a
crescent.

Festooned across the belts are strange glyphs looking like the
letters C and H, suggesting, along with the symbols displayed as
neck pendants, that the Göbekli builders had a highly developed form
of symbolic script.

Fig. 3.

The belt on Enclosure
D’s Pillar 18

(Pic credit: Andrew
Collins).

Clearly, these people belonged to an advanced culture, one beyond
that expected among the hunter-gathering societies existing in
southwest Asia at the end of the last glacial age.

On top of this, the twelve-fold division
of the stones in Enclosures C and D suggests a harmonisation with
the celestial bodies, in particular the cycles of the sun and moon.

Did the Göbekli builders synchronize
their monuments with the movements of the heavenly bodies?

Battle of the
Stars

Perched on the summit of a mountain ridge, with clear views of the
local horizon, it makes sense to explore the possibility that
Göbekli Tepe’s megalithic structures might once have targeted the
movement of the sun, moon and stars. It is a matter that has already
attracted the interest of the academic world.

In 2012 Robert Schoch, a
geologist with the University of Boston, proposed that the twin
central pillars in Enclosures B, C and D at Göbekli Tepe targeted
the rising of the belt stars of Orion as they would have appeared on
the horizon during the epoch of their construction.

As attractive as this proposal might
seem - especially in view of Orion’s prominence in ancient
astronomies - Schoch’s findings were dismissed by Italian
astrophysicist and archaeoastronomer Giulio Magli of the University
of Milan.

Having checked Göbekli Tepe’s
relationship with Orion at this time, Magli discovered that for
these alignments to work the megalithic enclosures would have to be
at least a thousand years younger than any current dating estimates,
which suggest a foundation date for the main enclosures somewhere in
the region of ca. 9500-9000 BC.

Sirius Rising

Instead, Magli proposed that the twin central pillars of Enclosures
C and D targeted the bright star Sirius, which in around 9500 BC
began rising again at the latitude of Göbekli Tepe after an absence
of almost 5,500 years; this absence being due to the actions of
precession (the earth’s slow wobble on its axis across a cycle of
approximately 26,000 years).

The sudden appearance on the southern
horizon of this bright star might, Magli proposed, have catalyzed
the local hunter-gathering communities into building the first
monumental architecture in human history.

It was another very attractive idea, and
coming from an academic like Magli, it was destined to feature in
scientific magazines, journals and websites worldwide.

But was it correct? Had Italy’s leading
archaeo-astronomer found the true purpose behind the creation of
Göbekli Tepe?

Unimpressive
Star

Chartered engineer Rodney Hale, who has examined claims of
astronomical alignments at prehistoric sites for the past fifteen
years, took up the matter.

He determined that when Sirius first
began to rise again around 9500 BC, the star only managed a feeble
arc across the southern horizon before disappearing out of sight, a
situation that barely changed for hundreds of years.

What is more, astronomy tells us that
the nearer a star is to the horizon, the dimmer it will appear to
the eye due to various natural factors, including atmospheric
absorption and aerosol pollution.

These factors have established values,
and when properly calculated for the latitude of Göbekli Tepe for
8950 BC and 9400 BC, the dates offered by Magli’s alignments for
Enclosures C and D respectively, Sirius would have been barely
visible as it passed low over the southern horizon (see Fig. 4).

Moreover, the low arc the star made each
night meant that it shifted its position against the local horizon
by as much as 3ş in just 20 minutes, making it a highly unsuitable
target to align monoliths toward with an estimated weight of around
fifteen tonnes a piece.

As a consequence, it seems improbable that the hunter-gatherers of
southeast Anatolia gave up their free lives to create and maintain
enormous megalithic temples like Göbekli Tepe just to follow the
actions of a somewhat unimpressive star.

Fig 4.

The faint star Sirius
as it would have appeared

rising on the
southern horizon in 9400 BC.

If astronomical alignments really did feature at Göbekli Tepe, they
had to have more obvious, more practical, implications.

Moreover, their existence should
resonate with the beliefs and practices of the Epi-Paleolithic (that
is, terminal Upper Paleolithic) peoples inhabiting the ancient world
in the epoch immediately prior to the construction of Göbekli Tepe.

Where the
Stars Turn

Schoch and Magli had concentrated their efforts in identifying a
target star in the southern sky, simply because the stone structures
at Göbekli Tepe are located in the southern section of its
occupational mound, suggesting that the gaze of its assumed
astronomer-priests was toward the south.

Yet there is every reason to believe
that the structures are directed not southwards, towards Orion or
Sirius, but north towards the circumpolar (i.e., never setting) and
near circumpolar stars that forever turn about the celestial pole.

What is more, a person standing between
the twin central pillars in Enclosures C and D at the proposed time
of their construction, ca. 8980 and 9400 BC

Fig. 5.

Left, plan of
Enclosure D showing position of holed stone

and mean azimuth of
the twin central pillars.

Right, the holed
stone in Enclosure D.

(Pic Credits: Rodney
Hale/Andrew Collins)

respectively, would have been able to gaze northwards toward the
local horizon through a large porthole bored through one of the wide
faces of a standing stone, positioned in the north-northwest section
of the boundary wall (Fig. 5 & 6).

Fig 6.

Enclosure D’s twin
central pillars

showing the position
of the holed stone immediately behind them.

(Pic credit: Andrew
Collins)

Indeed, the position of the portholes exactly reflects the mean
azimuths of the twin sets of pillars in each enclosure, indicating
that there might have been something important to watch out for on
the north-northwest horizon.

Aligned to
Deneb

Rodney Hale calculated the mean azimuths of the twin
monoliths in Enclosures C and D using site surveys, and determined
that just one bright star aligned with the portholes each night, and
this was Deneb in
the Cygnus Constellation, the
celestial swan, also known as the Northern Cross.

This meant that if a person were to
stand between the twin central pillars in these enclosures, they
could have watched Deneb set through the circular apertures of the
holed stones (Fig. 7).

Fig. 7.

The setting of
Cygnus’s bright star Deneb

aligned with the
holed stone in Enclosure D. Not to scale.

(Pic credit: Rodney
Hale)

So why might the Göbekli builders have been interested in this
particular star?

The answer lies in the fact that it
marks the point on the Milky Way where it splits to form two
separate streams, due to the presence of stellar dust and debris in
line with the axis of the galactic plane. Ancient cultures saw this
fork or cleft, known to astronomers as the Great Rift or Cygnus
Rift, as an entrance to the sky-world, or upper world, existing
beyond the physical realm, an idea that might well go back to
Paleolithic times.

In 2000 Dr. Michael Rappenglück of the
University of Munich examined the famous painted fresco of a bison
and bird-headed man in the Lascaux cave system in southern France,
executed ca. 16,500-15,000 BC (see Fig. 8).

He concluded that it depicts an abstract
representation of the area of sky to which it faces, in particular
the bright star Deneb in Cygnus.

Fig. 8.

Reconstruction of the
enigmatic well scene

in the Lascaux cave
in France’s Dordogne region

(Pic credit: Yuri
Leitch).

Deneb, at the time, was Pole Star, in other words its marked the
position of the celestial pole, the turning point of the heavens.

It is a fact expressed, Rappenglück
argued, in the image beneath the birdman of a bird on a pole.

Note: Pole stars change across the millennia
due to the effects of precession. Today Polaris in Ursa Minor is
Pole Star. Between 16,500 BC and 14,000 BC it was Deneb. Between ca.
14,000 and 13,000 BC it was the star Delta Cygni, and between ca.
13,000-11,000 BC it was Vega in Lyra. Thereafter there was no pole
star for several thousand years, meaning that when Göbekli Tepe was
built, ca. 9500-8000 BC, no star marked the celestial pole.

Arguably the bird on a stick at Lascaux
shows the Cygnus constellation marking the position of the celestial
pole, with the pole itself representing the so-called axis mundi, or
axis of the earth. This is a place or location, usually a ritual or
holy site, where the cosmic axis, the turning point of the heavens,
was thought to be anchored to the ground.

As for the birdman next to the pole, he
is very likely a shaman ascending to the sky world during some kind
of ecstatic or altered state of consciousness.

Vulture Shamanism

On the Euphrates the stars making up the Cygnus constellation were
seen not as a celestial swan, its usual avian identity,
but as a vulture, a primary symbol
of death and rebirth in the Neolithic age.

Indeed, the vulture features prominently
in the carved art of Göbekli Tepe and also at other Neolithic cult
centers in Anatolia.

The reason for the bird’s prominence in
the cult of the dead is its association with excarnation, the
defleshing of human carcasses following death, something known to
have been practiced in Anatolia during Neolithic times.

The soul of the individual, usually
depicted as a ball-like head, is occasionally shown departing its
material environment in the company of the vulture, acting in its
capacity as a psychopomp, a Greek word meaning "soul carrier" or
"soul accompanier."

Fig. 9.

Göbekli Tepe’s
Vulture Stone (Pillar 43),

with the Cygnus stars
overlaid on its main vulture carving

(Pic credit: Rodney
Hale).

So in Neolithic times, and arguably during the Paleolithic age, the
human soul was perhaps seen to enter the afterlife either as a
vulture or accompanied by a vulture.

This act is shown on Göbekli Tepe’s
Pillar 43, a.k.a the Vulture Stone, situated immediately to the left
of the structure’s holed stone.

It shows the soul of a deceased person
as a ball on the wing of a strange looking vulture with outstretched
wings that bears a distinct likeness to the shape of the Cygnus
constellation (see Fig. 9).

Vulture wings, some still articulated,
unearthed at one early Neolithic site in southwest Asia indicate
that shamans of this period adopted the guise of the vulture to
perform ceremonies in which they would exit their physical
environment and enter otherworldly realms.

Their sky-world, where the soul returned
to in death and new souls emerged from prior to birth, was most
likely seen to exist beyond the opening to the Milky Way’s Great
Rift, marked by the star Deneb in Cygnus.

This, as we have seen, was synchronized
at the moment of its setting with the apertures of the holed stones
erected in Enclosures C and D at Göbekli Tepe.

Was it through the apertures in these
stones that the shamans exited this world so that they might
converse with power animals, ancestral spirits and celestial beings?
Is this what the stone temples at Göbekli Tepe were - portals to the
sky-world, quite literally star-gates?

If so, then what were these star portals
used for, and by whom?

Cult of the
Fox

The biggest clue is an animal displayed frequently in the carved art
at Göbekli Tepe.

This is the fox. It is seen leaping
across the inner faces of various of the twin central pillars in
Enclosures A, B, C and D (see Fig. 10). In addition to this, the
anthropomorphic twin monoliths at the centre of Enclosure D have
fox-pelt loincloths carved in relief beneath their wide belts, as if
the T-shapes are wearing them to cover their genitalia.

What is more, the high level of faunal
remains belonging to the red fox (Vulpes vulpes) found at Göbekli
Tepe led archaeozoologist Joris Peters, writing with Klaus
Schmidt, to conclude that the interest in this creature went
beyond any domestic usage and must be connected with the,

"exploitation of its pelt and/or the
utilization of fox teeth for ornamental purposes."

That this statement was made before the
discovery of the fox-pelt loincloths carved on the front narrow
faces of Enclosure D’s central pillars means that what Peters and
Schmidt go on to say in the same paper should not be ignored, for in
their opinion this evidence suggests "a specific worship of foxes
may be reflected here."

So why the fox? Why was this animal so important at Göbekli Tepe?

Fig. 10.

Leaping fox
bas-relief on the inner face

of Enclosure B’s
Pillar 10

(Pic credit: Andrew
Collins).

Cosmic
Trickster

The answer seems to be comets.

In various parts of the ancient world
the fox, or more correctly the fox’s tail, has been identified with
the appearance of comets (a three- pronged comet-like symbol appears
on the belt buckle worn by one of the twin monolith in Enclosure D,
directly above the fox-pelt loincloth - see Fig. 11).

Foxes are seen as manifestations of a
supernatural creature in the form of a trickster, and when not a
fox, this same mythical creature is most often identified with the
wolf.

In Norse mythology the trickster is the
Fenris wolf. With its fierce lupine offspring, Fenris wreaks havoc
at Ragnarok, the Doom of the Gods, a kind of pagan Armageddon where
even the gods die trying to save the world during an almighty
cataclysm involving fire, flood and ice.

As early as 1884 US congressman and
catastrophe writer Ignatius Donnelly (1831-1901) proposed in his
book Ragnarok: The Age of Fire and Gravel,
that the Fenris wolf and other supernatural canids featured in the
Ragnarok account are abstract memories of a series of comet impacts
that devastated the planet towards the end of the last great glacial
age.

And it is not just in Northern Europe that supernatural canines are
seen as harbingers of all-encompassing catastrophes involving fire
and flood.

They occur right across Europe, and are
found also in the sacred writings of Zoroastrianism, a religious
doctrine that once thrived in Iran, India, and Armenia.

In a holy book entitled the Bundahishn
it states:

"As Gokihar falls in the celestial
sphere from a moon-beam on to earth, the distress of the earth
becomes such-like as that of a sheep when a wolf falls upon it."

Gokihar is generally translated as
"meteor," that is, a comet, asteroid, or bolide of some sort, while
the name itself has been interpreted as meaning "wolf progeny."

In other words, the statement in the Bundahishn expresses the manner
in which the land was seen to buckle and bend with the impact of
some cosmic object, a terrifying event likened to the manner in
which a sheep collapses when attacked by a wolf.

In many ancient societies
epoch-shattering cataclysms were often seen to have been caused or
triggered by the actions of supernatural sky-creatures - cosmic
tricksters ever ready to attack the axis mundi, the world axis or
sky-pole, and as a consequence bring about the destruction of the
world. Usually, the daily turning of the axis was imagined as being
undertaken by further cosmic creatures, most commonly oxen pulling a
plough or wain.

They are imagined as circling around the
celestial pole to which they were tethered, causing the stars to
revolve about the heavens.

Fig. 12.

The Plough or Big
Dipper constellation,

which forms part of
Ursa Major, the great bear,

as a celestial wain,
showing the position

of Alcor, the Fox Star or Wolf
Star

(Pic credit: Andrew
Collins/Storm Constantine/Rodney Hale).

Once and
Future Fate

Astronomically, this turning mechanism of the heavens is identified
with the seven stars of the Plough constellation, also known as the
Big Dipper, or Ursa Major, the great bear, which is forever seen to
turn about the celestial pole.

One of its stars, the tiny Alcor, which
lies close to a larger star named Mizar, is identified with the
cosmic trickster, and even bears the name Fox Star or Wolf Star in
various ancient astronomies (see Fig. 12).

It was seen as a visible reminder of the
sky-wolf or sky-fox who constantly tries to attack and bring down
the sky-pole holding up the heavens.

Therefore it was of paramount importance
among ancient cultures, particularly in Europe, to protect the
cosmic axis from the mischievous actions of the trickster, as
catastrophic events like
Ragnarok were not simply events that
happened in the past.

They were seen as the once and future fate of
the world.

The only way of countering the baleful influence of the trickster
was through the actions of the shaman. It was their duty to enter
the sky-world, where the sky-fox or sky-wolf roamed freely, and here
either appease it, or outwit it in some manner.

Catastrophobia

In central Europe, in what is today the Czech Republic, and also on
the Russian plain, considerable evidence has emerged from Upper
Paleolithic settlements of beliefs and practices involving fox and
wolf paraphernalia, including teeth, claws and skulls.

So to find similar evidence emerging
from Göbekli Tepe of ritual activity involving the fox should not be
ignored.

Is it possible that its stone
temples were utilized by shamans entering the sky-world, via
the Milky Way’s Great Rift sky-portal, to ensure that the
sky-fox, or indeed the sky-wolf (3D carvings of wolves have
been found at Göbekli Tepe), did not bring destruction to
the world?

Did the Epi-Palaeolithic peoples
of southeast Anatolia have some reason to believe that
cosmic cataclysms, perhaps associated with incoming comets,
might occur in their own lifetimes?

Did these hunter-gatherer
communities suffer from what writer and visionary
Barbara
Hand Clow calls catastrophobia, the recurring fear of
cataclysms?

The Younger
Dryas Event

Today, scientists are recognizing the fact that some 12,900 years
ago the earth underwent a terrifying period of destruction caused
most likely by fragments of a disintegrating comet (see Fig. 13).

Geological, archaeological and paleo-climatological records reveal
the terrifying consequences of this proposed cataclysm, which caused
super-tsunamis, mass flooding, severe wildfires, and a subsequent
period of darkness, believed to have triggered a 1,300-year mini ice
age known as the
Younger Dryas event.

Fig. 13.

Did a comet impact
with the earth around 12,900 years ago?

Did its aftermath
result in the construction of GT?

(Pic credit: USGC)

Although scientists believe the largest and most intense impacts
occurred on the American continent, various other areas of the world
suffered as well.

From Belgium across to Belarus, and from
Egypt all the way down to Australia, an eight-centimeter
(three-inch) thick layer of ash and fire debris is present in the
geological record corresponding to a date of approximately 12,900
years ago.

Known as
the Usselo horizon (see Fig.
14), it has been found to contain microscopic evidence of an impact
scenario, including magnetic spherules and nano-diamonds.

These are usually created during
extremely high temperature aerial blasts, triggered in this instance
by disintegrating comet fragments.

What is more, compelling evidence of a
close-proximity air blast at this same time has been found at an Epi-Paleolithic
settlement site named Abu Hureyra, just 100 miles (160 kilometers)
from Göbekli Tepe, showing that southwest Asia did not escape the
devastation.

Fig. 14.

The eight-centimetre
(three-inch) Usselo Horizon.

This example of the
boundary layer was found at Lommel, Belgium,

and dated at 12,940
years ago.

The same ash-rich
layer has been found at sites all over the world

(Pic credit: Johán B.
Kloosterman).

A Cycle of
Catastrophes

Yet even if this cataclysmic event did occur, how could it have
instilled a sense of catastrophobia within the inhabitants of
southeast Anatolia, strong enough for them to build Göbekli Tepe?

Well, the fact of the matter is that the
Younger Dryas Boundary impact event, its official title among the
scientific community, was not a lone event that took place on a
single day.

Ice core samples from Greenland indicate
that following the initial event in around 10,900 BC, the northern
hemisphere experienced incessant wildfires for hundreds of years
afterwards, culminating with another spike of activity around 10,340
BC.

Dr. Richard Firestone of Lawrence
Berkeley National Laboratory of Nuclear Science and his co-authors
in their book The Cycle of Cosmic Catastrophes (2006), which sets
out the full extent of the Younger Dryas impact event, believes that
10,340 BC "may be the date of one of the impacts."

This brings us within eight hundred years of the construction of
Göbekli Tepe and explains why there might well have been a lingering
case of catastrophobia among the inhabitants of southeast Anatolia.

If this was the case, then we can say
with some certainty that one of the principal purposes behind its
construction was to enable shamans to enter the sky-world and
curtail the baleful actions of the cosmic trickster, which if not
kept in check might well have brought about the destruction of the
world.

The First Gods

Yet even assuming these ideas
are correct,

Who was responsible for initiating such a
mammoth building project?

Was it simply the product of
local hunter-gathering societies working together over an
extended period of time?

Or might there have been other
forces at work here?

Answers can, most likely, be found in
the presence of the anthropomorphic pillars set in circles around
the twin central pillars in the various enclosures.

Clearly, they have human form and may
thus be seen as highly abstract statues. Schmidt has called them the
first gods, celestial beings, and divine ancestors, but why do they
have hammer-shaped heads? The front protrusion might easily
represent an elongated face and jaw line, but what about the rear
extension. What does this represent?

At Kilisik, near the town of Adıyaman in
southeast Anatolia, just over 50 miles (80 kilometers) away from
Göbekli Tepe, a mini T-shaped figure was found in 1965 (see Fig.
15).

Unlike the larger, more abstract
T-shaped pillars found at Göbekli Tepe, this particular example,
which dates to the same age, gives a more realistic impression of
what it is meant to signify.

And suddenly it becomes clear that the
extension at the back of the head is in fact a hood or headdress of
some sort.

With this knowledge other stone
figurines with extended heads found at Pre-Pottery Neolithic sites
elsewhere in the region can also now be re-examined, and these too
suggest that some kind of hood is being worn by the figure in
question.

These hooded figures bear all the
hallmarks of a ruling elite behind the construction at the site.

Do the T-shapes therefore
represent the great ancestors of those who offered the local
hunter-gatherer communities the remedy for their proposed
catastrophobia in the centuries following the aftermath of
the Younger Dryas boundary impact event?

So what was the identity of this
ruling elite?

Where did they come from, and
who were their great ancestors?

Fig. 15.

The T-shaped statue
found at Kilisik, near the town of Adıyaman in southeast Turkey,

and thought to be
contemporary with the construction phases at Göbekli Tepe.

Note the hood-like
extension to the rear of the head.

(Pic credit:
Gaziantep Museum)

The Big Chill

In the wake of the Younger Dryas impact event the chances are that
ice age populations would have been on the move, seeking new
territories.

The mini ice age triggered by the
cataclysm not only caused a drop in temperature in areas affected by
the cold spell, but also brought about long-lasting droughts in
regions beyond the extent of the ice, including southwest Asia.

This would have resulted in the drying
up of springs, streams and river sources, and the disappearance of
herd animals seen as essential to the survival of Paleolithic
hunter-gatherer societies across the Eurasian continent.

Hunting
groups would have travelled hundreds, if not thousands, of miles to
find new territories, where sufficient numbers of herd animals and
adequate food and water supplies, might be found to sustain their
communities.

As can be imagined, this would have
resulted in territorial skirmishes and even fierce battles, leading
to some populations either being annihilated or taken over by
incoming groups, who would have seized the opportunity to exploit
human populations and natural resources.

The Swiderians

In 1987 American historian Mary Settegast, in a compelling book
entitled Plato Prehistorian, wrote about the imagined impact
a global catastrophe would have had on human populations at the end
of the last glacial age.

Not only did she uncover evidence of
widescale bloodshed and violence across Europe and western Asia at
this time, but she also noticed the footprints (see Fig. 16) of a
very specific group of reindeer hunters reaching all the way from
the Carpathian Mountains in Central Europe across to the Crimean
Mountains, north of the Black Sea in what is today the Ukraine, a
distance of some 850 miles (1,400 kilometers).

This easterly migration she saw as
hunting groups exploring foreign territories, looking to exploit new
resources now that the precious reindeer herds had disappeared into
the arctic regions far to the north.

These reindeer hunters are
known as
the Swiderians, after the "type site" where their cultural
traits were first recognized at Swidry Wielkie in Otwock, near
Warsaw, in Poland.

Not only were they an advanced hunting
society, with a unique stone tool technology, but the Swiderians
also established sophisticated mining operations, some of the only
accepted examples from the Paleolithic age, within the
Swietokrzyskie (Holy Cross) Mountains of central Poland. Here they
extracted "exotic" forms of flint, as well as hematite, used as
ochre.

Long distance trading routes were
established to transport stone tools and pre-form cores across
hundreds of miles. Thus there is little question that the Swiderians
were among the first miners anywhere in the world.

More importantly,
they walked the earth both during and in the aftermath of the
proposed Younger Dryas impact event.

Fig. 16.

Map showing the
distribution of Swiderian tanged points

found in Central and
Eastern Europe

during the tenth and
eleventh millennia BC.

Obsidian
Obsession

One of the exotic materials coveted by the Swiderians was the black
volcanic glass known as obsidian.

This they procured from find sites in
the Carpathian Mountains, where even today obsidian is considered a
magical substance, born of the sky and embodying the power of fire
itself; it also happens to be one of the sharpest substances on
earth.

The Epi-Paleolithic communities existing in eastern Anatolia
during the Younger Dryas cold spell also coveted obsidian for making
tools and projectile points.

This they obtained from key find sites
close to a volcano named
Nemrut Dag on the shores of Lake Van,
Turkey’s largest inland sea, and in the foothills surrounding
Bingöl
Mountain, located in the nearby Armenian Highlands.

Tools and points made from obsidian
deriving from these locations have been found in great quantities at
proto- Neolithic sites in eastern Anatolia, seen as precursors to
Göbekli Tepe.

Swiderian
Takeover

Among the stone tools and projectile points found at Göbekli Tepe
are many made from obsidian originating from both Bingöl Mountain
and Lake Van.

Both in style and the manner of
production they bear close similarities to the toolkit of
the Swiderians, who are known to have reached as far east as the
Caucasus Mountains, where they would have come up against indigenous
peoples, most likely members of another advanced society known as
the Zarzians, who almost certainly controlled the local obsidian
trade at this time.

It seems likely that Swiderian groups
continued southward, reaching eventually the obsidian find sites
around Bingöl Mountain and Lake Van.

This would have brought them within easy
reach of the late Palaeolithic and early Neolithic communities of
southeast Anatolia (even Klaus Schmidt himself has compared the
hunting strategies of the Pre-Pottery Neolithic peoples of southeast
Anatolia with those of the Swiderians of the East European Plain).

Upper
Paleolithic Ancestors

The advanced tool making skills and mining capabilities of the
Swiderians, whose hunting strategies Schmidt has himself compared
with those of the earliest Neolithic communities of southeast
Anatolia, have been connected with those of the Solutreans (see Fig.
17), one of the most mysterious cultures of the Upper Paleolithic
age.

They thrived in Western Europe between
ca. 25,000-16,500 years ago, and developed an extraordinary stone
blade technology. They were also responsible for some of the
earliest ice age art in Western Europe, including the bison and
birdman fresco in France’s
Lascaux Cave.

The Solutreans came, most likely, from
Central Europe, and were connected to another advanced population -
that of the Eastern
Gravettians, who thrived in highly advanced
settlements in both Central Europe and on the Russian Plain between
30,000 and 20,000 BC.

They built communal buildings,
experimented with cereal farming as much as 30,000 years ago;
introduced the Mother Goddess cult, expressed in the production of
full-bodied Venus figurines; wore tailored clothes, sewn together
using bone needles, and revered both the wolf and arctic fox, which
would seem to have been associated with the soul’s journey into the
afterlife.

Fig. 17.

On the left a
Solutrean lance head around 20,000 years old,

and on the right a
Swiderian point fashioned from chocolate flint,

around 11,000 years
old. Not to scale.

(Pic credits: J. L.
Katzman/Aggsbach Paleolithic Blog).

Neanderthal
Hybrids

Anthropological evidence suggests that at least some Swiderians were
of striking appearance.

They were tall, with large,
dolichocephalic (that is, elongated) heads, long faces, high
cheekbones, and strong jaws. Very likely, they derived not only from
the Cro-Magnons, the earliest anatomically modern humans to enter
Europe some forty-three thousand years ago, but also from another
human type known to have existed in Central Europe around
twenty-five thousand years ago.

Named as "Brünn Man" by anthropologists of the late nineteenth and
early twentieth centuries, evidence of their existence was first
noted among human remains found at a Gravettian site unearthed in
1891 at Brünn, modern Brno, in Moravia, the modern Czech Republic.

Other examples were found in 1894
alongside wolf skulls at another Gravettian site unearthed at
Predmostí, also in Moravia.

The Brünn type humans were tall with
large, elongated skulls, long faces, strong brow ridges, and other
striking features. Anthropologists of the late nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries found firm evidence that the Solutreans were
linked to the Brünn population.

Moreover, that these suspected ancestors
of the Solutreans had migrated to Central Europe from the Russian
Plain, where advanced Gravettian settlements have been unearthed,
some of which have produced human remains comparable with those of
the Brünn type.

If the Swiderians did derive
physiological traits from the Brünn population, then it is possible
that both gained at least part of their unique physiognomy and
technical skills from the Neanderthals, humanity’s closest cousins,
whose communities lingered on in Eastern Europe until around 30,000
to 40,000 years ago.

In fact, Swiderian physiognomy was
linked with the concept of Neanderthal hybrids as early as 1956,
following the discovery of two human crania, one in Lithuania and
another in Central Russia, which show Neanderthal-hybrid traits, and
yet are attributable to the Swiderian population.

Further confirmation has come from the
discovery of skeletal remains belonging to a Post-Swiderian culture,
which have been compared with those of the Brünn population, who
were themselves most probably Neanderthal-human hybrids.

The Ruling
Elite

It is proposed that having assumed control of the obsidian trade in
eastern Anatolia, the incoming Swiderian groups became the ruling
elite responsible for the creation of Göbekli Tepe.

Is it the memory of their great
ancestors, who might have included Solutreans, Gravettians and even
Neanderthal-human hybrids, that is enshrined in the twelvefold rings
of T-shaped pillars found in key enclosures?

It was the Swiderian elite who most
likely introduced the manner in which the hunter-gatherer
populations of southeast Anatolia could alleviate their
catastrophobia, the fear of further cataclysms in the wake of the
Younger Dryas impact event.

These individuals, and their
descendants, probably controlled and managed the various phases of
building activity at Göbekli Tepe, something that led eventually to
the introduction of animal husbandry and agriculture across the
region, marking the earliest stages of the Neolithic revolution.

The Final
Abandonment

Over a period of around fifteen hundred years twenty or more major
enclosures were constructed within the gradually emerging
occupational mound at Göbekli Tepe.

Old enclosures were periodically
decommissioned, deconsecrated and covered over, quite literally
"killed," at the end of their useful lives. New structures were
built to replace them, but as time went by they became gradually
smaller and more simpler in construction, until eventually they were
no bigger than a family-sized Jacuzzi with pillars no more than one
and a half meters (five feet) in height.

Somehow the world had changed, and the
impetus for creating gigantic stone temples with monoliths as much
as five and a half meters high was no longer there.

Sometime around 8000 BC the last
remaining enclosures were covered over with earth and refuse matter,
and the site abandoned to the elements.

All that remained was an
enormous belly-shaped mound that became an ideal expression of the
fact that the stone enclosures had originally been seen, not just as
star portals to another world, but also as womb-like chambers, where
the souls of shaman, or indeed the spirits of the dead,

could quite literally journey to the source of creation, located
somewhere in the vicinity of the Cygnus constellation. It was a
concept dimly reflected in the name Göbekli Tepe, which in Turkish
means "navel-like hill."

The
Serpent-headed People

Even after Göbekli Tepe was abandoned, its memory, and those of the
ruling elite behind its construction, lingered among the
Halaf and
later
Ubaid peoples who flourished during the latter part of the
Neolithic age, ca. 6000-4100 BC.

Like their predecessors, they gained
control of the all-important obsidian trade from find sites such as
Bingol Mountain and Nemrut Dag, close to Lake Van. Their elites, who
would appear to have belonged to specific family groups,
artificially deformed their already elongated heads.

It is very possibly these ancestors who
are depicted as the
snake- or reptilian-headed figurines found in Ubaid cemeteries (see Fig. 18).

Their birthplace was said to have been
the Duku, a primeval mound located on the summit of a world mountain
called Kharsag, or Hursag.

Here the Anunnaki gave humanity the
first sheep and grain, which we can see as a memory of the
introduction of animal husbandry and agriculture at the time of the
Neolithic revolution.

The Anunnaki are occasionally likened to
serpents, reflecting the snake-like physiognomy of the ruling elite
of the earlier Halaf and Ubaid cultures.

The Coming of
the Watchers

Then we come to the impact Göbekli Tepe had on the earliest Semitic
peoples of North Mesopotamia.

Their oral traditions would one day be
carried into the land of Canaan by the first Israelites and recorded
down in religious works such as the
Book of Enoch and the Book of
Giants.

In these so-called Enochian texts the
prime movers behind the construction of Göbekli Tepe, and the
subsequent Neolithic revolution, are described as tall, pale-looking
human angels
called Watchers (see Fig. 19 & 20), who wear feather
coats, have visages like vipers (that is, they have long facial
features), and are occasionally described as Serpents (indeed, one
Watcher is named as the Serpent that beguiled Eve in the Garden of
Eden).

Two hundred of their number are said to have descended among mortal
kind and taken mortal wives, who produced giant
offspring called Nephilim.

According to the book of Enoch, the
rebel Watchers revealed to their wives the secret arts of heaven,
many of which correspond pretty well with a number of firsts for
humanity that took place in southwest Asia in the wake of the
Neolithic revolution.

Are the Watchers a memory of the
appearance in Anatolia of
the Swiderians, whose striking appearance
fits the description of the Watchers?

If so, then does it suggest that the
strange appearance of the Watchers, with their long serpentine
faces, might in part be due to them being Neanderthal-human hybrids
(see Fig. 21)?

Fig. 21.

3D sculpts showing a
Swiderian male and female

by artist Russell M.
Hossain based on available anatomical evidence.

Are these the faces
of the elite who inspired the creation of Göbekli Tepe,

as well as the
Watchers and Anunnaki of myth and legend?

Do they show also
Neanderthal-human hybrids?

(Pic credit: Russell
M. Hossain)

The Rivers of
Paradise

A memory also of this crucial epoch in human development is perhaps
preserved in the stories of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden.

According to the book of Genesis this
was located, in geographical terms, where the four rivers of
Paradise took their course. Three of these rivers are easily
determined. They are the Euphrates, the Tigris and the Araxes (the
biblical Gihon), which all rise either in the mountains south of
Lake Van or nearby in the Armenian Highlands.

What is more, two of the rivers, the
Euphrates and Araxes, are seen to take their rise in the same
vicinity - on the slopes of Bingöl Mountain, one of the primary
sources of obsidian located around 200 miles (322 kilometers) from
Göbekli Tepe (see Fig. 22).

Local tradition asserts that Bingöl was
also the source of the fourth river of Paradise, the Pison, while
ancient writers recorded that the true source of the Tigris was also
in the Armenian Highlands.

This then was the true geographical
location of Paradise.

The Place of
Descent

Also just 180 miles (290 kilometers) from Göbekli Tepe is the
original "Place of Descent" where, according to tradition, Noah’s
Ark came to rest following the great flood, the story told in the
book of Genesis.

This is
Mount al-Judi, the modern Cudi
Dag, which rises above the town of Cizre in southeast Anatolia, and
not Mount Ararat further north in Armenia, which only received its
status as "Place of Descent" in the fifth century AD.

In Muslim, Syriac and Kurdish tradition, the true Place of Descent is Mount
al-Judi.

It is here that Noah and his family
began the process of repopulating the world after the deluge that
nearly destroyed the human race.

Fig. 22.

Map of eastern Turkey

showing the principal
rivers identified

with the four rivers
of Paradise.

The Secrets of
Adam

One of the most prolific branches of Gnostic Christianity were the
Sethians, a name honoring Seth, the third son of Adam and Eve.

In the centuries following the death of
Jesus they believed that Seth’s "seed", which included the
antediluvian patriarchs of the book of Genesis, were the only true
and righteous descendants of Adam, and the inheritors of his divine
wisdom.

Sethian writings, such as the
various
tracts found in a cave at Nag Hammadi in Egypt in 1945, speak
repeatedly of the secrets of Adam being passed to Seth before his
father’s death. Seth is said to have recorded them either in book
form, or on tablets or pillars called stelae.

These were hidden in
or on a holy mountain, existing in the vicinity of Paradise, so that
they might survive a coming cataclysm of fire and flood.

Called variously Charaxio, Seir, or Sir,
this mountain is linked in early Christian tradition with the site
inhabited by the generations of Adam following the expulsion of the
first couple from Paradise.

So what are the secrets of Adam,
and where might they be found today?

Do the secrets of Adam, written
down by Seth, pertain to the manner in which Göbekli Tepe
was built to curtail the catastrophobia rife among the
indigenous peoples of the region in the wake of the Younger
Dryas impact event?

Had this information been given
to the local hunter-gatherers of the region by incoming
Swiderian groups, whose elongated heads and long ancestry
was connected with their origins as Neanderthal-human
hybrids?

Did they become the human angels
called Watchers of the book of Enoch?

As Angels
Ourselves

Where exactly was Charaxio, or
Mount Seir, where the books of Seth
containing the secrets of Adam await discovery?

This is the quest I embark upon in the
second half of Göbekli Tepe: Genesis of the Gods, with the
result being the discovery in the Eastern Taurus Mountains of a
forgotten Armenian monastery overlooking the traditional site of the
Garden of Eden.

Before its destruction at the time of
the Armenian genocide of 1915, the monks here preserved archaic
traditions concerning the Garden of Eden and the existence of a holy
relic of incredible religious significance.

Confirmation of the presence of this
holy relic at the monastery (which in the seventh century was given
a special decree of immunity from attack signed by the prophet
Mohammed himself) reveals what could be Adam’s ultimate secret - the
manner in which we as mortals may re-enter Paradise and become, as
once we were, like angels ourselves.